Michael Newton wrote Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls, the books that introduced Life Between Lives hypnotherapy to the world, and the institute that carries his name still trains and certifies LBL practitioners today. Life Between Lives is the name he gave to deep hypnotic work centered on the period between incarnations, what your soul does after one life and before the next. I found out in 2007 that he was coming out of retirement to teach, and I made sure to be there. I traveled to Chicago that year to train with him, and that training is when I decided to specialize in spiritual hypnotherapy. I later served as a teaching assistant for LBL training, spent time with Michael at the Newton Institute strategy meeting at San Damiano in 2011, and returned there for LBL teacher training in 2014. The full story is in the Teachers and Influences section of my blog.

Most people have already read Michael Newton's Journey of Souls, and often Destiny of Souls too, before they ever reach out to me. That is usually why they want to do the session in the first place, because reading the book provides encouragement to want to experience this world. I do not think it has an impact on the experience itself. Just recently I talked with someone who had read it and was blown away by it. So I cannot give you a cut and dry answer, do it or do not do it, because it is up to the individual. Here is what I would say. If you have not read it and you are concerned that it might give you expectations, then just do not read it. The session does not need the book. And if you have already read it, like most of my clients, you are in good company.

Yes. In my experience, souls travel and reincarnate together in groups, often taking on roles as mother, father or sibling across many lifetimes. For twins the connection is especially intense, since they shared the womb and communicated with each other before birth. Even when one twin does not survive the pregnancy, that soul's energy often stays close as a spiritual guide. Using regression to explore these bonds, you can discover the agreements you made together, the karma you share and why you chose to walk this life side by side as siblings or twins. Clients often tell me it changes how they see the people they grew up with.

If you carry memories of dying as a soldier, you are in familiar territory for me. Clients with spontaneous recall of historic battles often carry residual physical and emotional weight from that death into this life. In hypnosis I use release techniques to separate that battlefield energy from your modern body. Reviewing the event from an observer's perspective helps your subconscious take in that the war is over and that you are safe in your current body today. Many people find the fear and tension they carried eases once that message lands. The memory stays, but its grip loosens.

No, your future is not set in stone. The way I understand it, you take part in a planning process before you are born. Your soul chooses your parents, your body and the main lessons you came here to learn, things like compassion or patience. What I have seen in sessions, though, is that this plan is a high level outline of major milestones rather than a minute by minute script. Once you are here, you have full free will. When you reach a crossroads in life, your choices decide which way you go, so what lies ahead is a set of probable outcomes rather than one fixed destiny. The plan gives you the big picture. How you walk it is up to you.

I cannot answer that specifically for you, because everyone is different, and that lifelong feeling of not fitting in is more common than you might think. It is one of the things people bring to a session as a question. I do not tell you where it comes from ahead of time, and I do not paint a picture during the session either. I ask you what you notice and let your own experience do the explaining. What I will say is that when someone finds the source of that feeling for themselves, the grief tends to lift, and settling into life here gets easier. The discovering is what helps, and it works best when every bit of it is yours.